Office 14 Won’t Launch Until 2010 – But Will It Delay Windows 7?

During his annual “strategic update” with Wall Street analysts, Steve Ballmer made it very clear that Office 14 will not launch in 2009. Normally outside of the business community, few would take notice of this. But with the high profile beta of Windows 7 igniting a passion in both raging Microsoft fans and Mac / Linux converts alike, a delay on the Office side should have everyone concerned. The reason for this is simple; Office releases usually follow operating system launches extremely closely. Windows XP & Office XP both shipped together in 2002, and Windows Vista & Office 12 shipped together in January 2007 as well. Even though some versions of Office have released in-between operating systems, if we simply rely on history as a guide we won’t be seeing Windows 7 until 2010.

Microsoft released an alpha version of its new office suite back in January, and rumors were swirling that Office 14 would indeed come in 2009, rumors Steve Ballmer has now put to rest. With an open beta not planned until sometime in the summer, it seems likely that the RC (release candidate) version would push well into the fourth quarter and see an early 2010 release.

Now that we know Windows 7 development is far ahead of Office, will Microsoft delay the launch in order to have a concurrent release? Or will it break with tradition in order to capitalize on the good will that has been building since the release of the beta. Let us know what you think.

Comments

I have various machines with Office 97, XP and 2003. I don't even need anything beyond '97. Operating systems have been a different story for me; Vista has actually been good for me in my HTPC, and showing a couple more smoke particles in games. Win XP was a complete killer of Win95, Win98, and WinME. If Win7 can knock off XP and Vista, more power to them.

What with netbooks (and their competitive price in these 'interesting' times) outstripping sales of both traditional notebooks and desktops, every daily - let alone monthly - delay in the release of Win7 further ingrains in the public the use of XP.

Microsoft (and with the help of some poorly realized Linux distros) have increased their market share in netbook OSs, but if users are happy enough with a familiar and (mostly) stable OS in XP, there is little incentive to wait for Win7 to show up a year from now (exactly how many million netbooks is that?) - or go thru an upgrade path from XP to Win7 - reportedly not going to be an easy thing.

Meanwhile, OS users already on Vista are looking to Win7 to fix a multitude of woes - and if Win7 is delayed to 'highlight' Office 14, then there is the real danger to Microsoft that those thoroughly fed up might look elsewhere (if they haven't already) for their OS - and Office Suite.

Win7 will not be the panacea will be all hope for (and, if history is anything to go by, it'll be Win7 SP1 that will actually be the OS that is workable), but the longer the delay Microsoft creates, the more difficult it will be to wean users off XP and other OSs.

I used Office for many years, on the Mac and PC. On the Mac there are still dozens of glitches and flaws, none of them ever been fixed for ten years now. The program will not hold the preferences, they have to be reset from time to time, I cannot insert a jpg image, only able to paste it in a document, the program makes decisions on its own and does things nobody asked, the tool palette keeps curling up and down for absolutely no reason. The whole experience is typical Microsoft stupidity. They want to play God and design software with a mind of its own, which is not what any user wants. We want the program only do what we tell them and no more. Thank you Microsoft, after years of frustration, now I use OpenOffice.org, Pages and Coffee. No trouble, all of them saves in .doc or .xml, so who cares about Office 14 or even Windows 7. Just because they screwed up Vista, now we should say thank you, after 8 years it may work, after they stolen and added a few ideas from Apple. I think, that anyone who signs up to work for Microsoft must obey their main rules; Intuition does not exist, steel innovation wherever you can find it, deadlines only exist at other companies.

Office XP was released May 31 2001. I purchased my first custom built pc that summer and it came with Office XP and Windows 98. I'll never forget the confusion of that stupid name (Its called Office XP but it contains Word 2002 etc...)

Beat me to it, I still remember the day it was released, sad that I remember that going on 8 years after. Also, the Xbox was released November 15, 2001 and Xbox Live started on November 15,2002. I didn't have to look any of those up :(